Linus to Nvidia: Yawn

The commentary lately coming from some normally eloquent tech writers — and from some in FOSS circles — has had the distinct taste of chicken. This commentary ranges from “Chicken Little,” where the sky is falling thanks to Fedora shelling out $99 to work on UEFI lockdowns, to chickenspit in the hubbub over Linus Torvald’s f-bomb to Nvidia.

The latter, of course, is a classic case of the molehill becoming a mountain thanks to commentary which takes the bigger picture and trades it all in for sensationalism.

While commentators who took the bait are now being reeled in, the reality here is that Linus is just being Linus — and I mean that in a good way — and to take a tiny slice out of context in a hour-long presentation that is, on the whole, an excellent one is a rank amateur move.

To say nothing of the fact that Linus is right about Nvidia, too — a point maybe escaping those who risking injury jumping on the Linus-is-hurting-Linux-by-being-nasty bandwagon. So while I called him out on his printer rant a while back — and I stand by that — I stand with Linus here in flipping off Nvidia.

In this instance, Linus T. speaks for me.

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(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Flipping off a company and then cursing at them is pretty classless. He could have articulated his point in a myriad of other ways and it would have still got picked up on news sites. Not to mention the disrespect shown to all those in attendance for his talk. In the end it marginalizes Linux a little bit by showing that the kernel creator is crass.

I didn’t hear a lot of shocked gasps during that 20 seconds of the 1-hour-plus video, did you? Or did you even watch it? In fact, I heard a lot of snickering and some laughs, so I don’t think the class Linus was addressing was at all “disrespected” or felt that way. Also, Linus is not the be-all and end-all for Linux, as it’s made up of thousands of contributions from developers worldwide. Get that and you get FOSS. Don’t get it and you don’t. Pretty simple there.

People are searching cheap sensation. The loudest ones are of course people who knows nothing about the guy, didn’t watch whole thing (or any other Linus videos) and are just flipped off about f-word… “uuu some geek used bad word he’s childish, has no class, he’s bad…” fuck you to! Did you heard about months of work to improve file path lookup? Did you heard him talking about writing in machine code because he miss-concept assembly language? No! People don’t give a crap about other things and just go nuts on cheep headlines (out of the context). Torvalds IS fucking genius.